Death is life’s ending. Because everyone who is born eventually dies, it is the center of many traditions and organizations. Customs relating to death are a feature of every culture around the world. Part of those customs are symbols, whcih signify or try to make sense of the phenomena.

Parties, Costumes, Food, Ghosts, Vampires, Witches, Jack-O-Lanterns…oh my! Halloween is one of the world’s favorite holidays, and The Visual History of Halloween brings all of the diverse history and influences together at last. Estimated as a $6.9 Billion industry today, Halloween is actually the combination of at least six different festivals and celebrations from hundreds (even thousands) of years ago. Click HERE to see the high-resolution version.

InfoNewt (my company) designed this one mainly focused on the historical foundation of Halloween. I’m sure a completely separate timeline could be made just covering the last 100 years of commercializing Halloween, but I tried to stay away from most of that with this one.

This was actually a very fun project, and a perfect topic for an infographic because the information available is so diverse and scattered. Of course, when you talk about history going back this far, there is also disagreement on what really happened. So, I plotted the most commonly accepted events and dates I could find. I had to pull from a handful of different sites to get all of the pieces to fit together.

Ghosts, werewolves and witches have a long history. It’s not until much more recent times that many of the other monsters we relate to Halloween appear. Count Dracula, vampires, Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, The Mummy, Jason and all of the horror movie villains appear in the last 300 years.

My time to complete this project was short, but I believe I captured the most critical events in history. Wouldn’t this make a great poster?

From FloatingSheep.com, this is the Christianity Map that maps the volume of searches related to the different branches of Christianity across the globe. The great cartographers from Floating Sheep published three maps showing the world, the U.S. and Europe.

…discovered patterns that are incredibly clear. Catholics are most visible in much of the Northeast and Canada, with Lutherans taking the Midwest, Baptists the Southeast, and Mormons unsurprisingly taking much of the mountain states. Methodists, interestingly, seem to primarily be most visible in a thin red line between the Southern Baptists and everyone else.

Taking a closer look at Europe, there is a fascinating split between Orthodox Eastern Europe, Protestant Germany, and Catholic everywhere else. In places such as the UK that contain more Protestants than Catholics it is likely that people aren’t using the actual term “Protestant” as a signifier of their religion.

These are a more detailed look specifically at Christianity after some of their earlier work on the Google Geographies of Religion that look at searches for the different figures of religion across the globe.